@ Festival Theatre, Edinburgh, until Sat 14 Feb 2015 (and touring)
The most parodied sequence in film history must be when white-suited John Travolta takes to the dancefloor in that oh-so-earnest paean to 1970s disco, Saturday Night Fever. The sequence encapsulates youthful posturing, male sexual energy and dad dancing all in a oner.
After some 40 years distance there’s no way the story can be taken too seriously, but the stage musical version tends to do just that. It’s a mix of nostalgia and a musical style that seems as old as the Black Bottom. Sensibly, for this adaptation (directed here by Ryan McBride), Robert Stigwood and Bill Oakes did something more original than merely transplant their film to the stage.
We open in the dark days of the 1970s recession (a time when petrol was rationed). You can tell that it’s the 70s because of the sexism and the swearing. The brown clad people in the gas queue will look like something from ancient history to anyone under 25 in the audience (an unlikely proposition).
Tony (a snake-hipped, high-stepping Danny Bayne) lives to escape his dreary day job for weekends under the disco strobes and this stage production is a smooth as Tony’s moves and as slick as his bouffant. But disco, once described as ‘the only true drug culture of the 1970s’, really plays second fiddle here, though CiCi Howells as the club singer captures the exuberance of the disco diva. The Bee Gees’ pounding, high-pitched hits are recast with bluesy, sax riffs in order to propel the story, as in Tony’s How Deep is Your Love duet with his dance partner Stephanie (Naomi Slights).
Disco music at its best was a multilayered studio creation of electronic synthesisers and it’s impossible to recreate this live on stage. Indeed, the disco scenes seem few and far between. The story of poor Italians ‘on the way to no place’ and a creaky background story about Tony’s nagging family contrasts with his disco inferno.
‘On the eighth day God created the DJ,’ we’re told by the guy in the elevated DJ pulpit at the dance competition that’s at the centre of the story. It’s the joyous, blissful dancing (body-popping and breakdance owes a huge debt to disco) that make this theatrical outing worth the admission. Suddenly everything makes sense: it’s about escape, redemption and one night stands fuelled by Bacardi and Coke. Saturday Night Fever the musical may not be what you’re expecting, but don’t blame it on the boogie.